Who is the community? Governing territory through the making of ‘indigenous communities’ in Cambodia

Abstract

Arguing that the process of recognition of community and territory is strongly contested and involves contrasting ontologies of community, place and belonging, I focus on the incommensurability between Bunong notions of legitimate claimants/claims and actual titled communities and territories that legalization produced. I give ethnographic evidence of generational power dynamics, NGO involvement and fraught mapping processes by drawing on concepts of hegemony, consent and refusal. Problematizing the making of indigenous communities for the sake of titling, I discuss the practical and theoretical implications of this process of recognition.